High Fives and Gender Gibes in the Sciences
Gender. A concept that seems not only to individuals but also society so fundamental, and yet so controversial. A key to unlock someone’s identity. A category on a legal document most likely with two proceeding check boxes—male or female.
We as humans love to create boxes of simple categories, put things—including people—into them, ship them off into to world and expect all the contents will stay neatly inside. Well, hate to burst people’s bubbles, but the route is not as smooth as it is inside a UPS truck and you can’t track the package on your phone, laptop, or tablet. There will always be outside forces handling these boxes.
Going along with this literal box analogy here, I also hate to break it, but people in the male category box tend to get express shipping…for free! Unfortunately, people in the female category box have to spend their allowance money on just priority shipping.
Why is the United States Postal Service so sexist??? (Note: I do not believe nor endorse the belief that the US Postal Service validates any sexist protocol, and am using it for merely analogical purposes.)
The real question at hand is why are women viewed as inferior to men especially in STEM fields?
High score? High five!
Give yourself a high five. Yes, do it! Yeah! Now, look at your palms. Think: it took so much talent to make my hands touch together in (roughly) the same spot. Imagine you have “talent” written across your palms. Talent means different things to different people, and the two mentioned in the article are entity theorists and incremental theorists. Since most people view STEM talents as entity theorists and most people in the U.S. are right handed, your right hand will represent entity theorists’ thoughts on talent in STEM and your left hand will represent incremental theorists’ thoughts.
Your right hand branches off onto your fingers—“stable,” “homogenous,” “differentiating,” “innate,” and “quantitative.” What do these words mean in relation to talent? Let’s throw in a dash of real life situations, shall we? For example, you’re in Calculus and just received your test from last week. 90 B. You glance over to the neighboring desk and see that person received a 98 A. The person catches you. “Wow, good job!” you exclaim. To which he replies, “Yeah, I’ve just always practically since I was born been really, really, super-duper good at math,” and turns around. Sigh. You’ve studied hours for this test and actually have brought your average from an 80 to an 85. Who’s to say you are not “really good at math”?
Your left hand branches off onto your fingers—“malleable,” “growing,” “learning,” “changing,” and “unquantifiable.” To answer the previous question, no one, really (well, maybe the entity theorists, but forget them for the time being). You still have talent written on your hand; it grows with you.
That is a concept that hasn’t gotten through quite though to most people, and a common misconception is quantifiable data equates to the truth. According to the data listed in the article, on average, women perform slightly under men on standardized tests. The idea that higher numbers equal higher intelligence gets drilled into our minds, thus into society’s collective mind. This trend follows suit in a study which measured the rate of women and men who achieve high education degrees. For instance, the study concurred 1 woman in 9 men received her doctorate in math. Some might think that automatically means men are superior to women in mathematics. I mean the data shows it! However, the data from the study also support the idea that the higher education system may not be doing all in its power to keep women in their respective STEM field since the number of women dwindled down at a higher rate. Yet, we can keep saying the data shows this, the data shows that, but what is really going behind all these numbers?
Final thoughts
I find the thought in the article “Females give birth and physically nurture their young…The next step is to add other trait that seem highly compatible with nurturance to the schema for females and to construct an “alternative” set of characteristics for men (35)” interesting to say the least. I haven’t really thought of the origins of the categories, just assumed they appeared out of nowhere (not exactly, but it seems like it). I ask how can we go from female gives birth to offspring to they’re nurturing by nature to their gentle to they’re weak (not a precise train of thought, but I gave it a shot)? Then turn around and say oh, males are just the opposite! I want to know! How can we quantify the boxcars in a train of thought?